Unfortunately, the intrinsic problem is not only a matter of good and bad arguments but of non-arguments, that is, of frequently repeated ideas whose consequences are rarely made explicit but nevertheless produce a demobilizing effect within antiwar movements. First, there are a certain number of illusions current in progressive movements; then, there are various devices to give “pacifists” a bad conscience, unfortunately often internalized.
When Lebanon was invaded in 1982, an Israeli opposed to that war, Uri Avnery, wrote an open letter to Menahem Begin titled: “Mr. Prime Minister, Hitler Is dead.”1 This was because Begin claimed to be attacking the “new Hitler,” meaning Arafat, entrenched in Beirut. Ever since the Suez Canal crisis, when Nasser was “Hitler on the Nile,” every adversary of the West-Saddam, Milosevic, the Islamists—is a “new Hitler,” “green fascist,” etc. One can observe that whenever the comparison is reversed, clumsily in my opinion (Bush or Sharon equals Hitler), it is met with accusations of trivializing Nazism. Of course, before there was Hitler, each new enemy-the Germans during the First World War, for example—were the new Huns, led by a new Attila, and this type of rhetoric can simply be dismissed as low-level war propaganda.
Nevertheless, beyond this rhetoric there is a vision of the Second World War that plays a major role in legitimizing war. The general idea is that the West, by cowardice or indifference, waited too long to launch a preventive war against Hitler that would have saved the Jews. This argument is psychologically particularly effective, and particularly vicious, when it is used against people of the generation that grew up in the 1960s and felt that the crimes committed against the Jews had not been sufficiently recognized immediately after 1945.
America’s antiwar movement still puny and struggling, is showing signs of being hijacked by one of the oldest and darkest prejudices there is. Perhaps it was inevitable. The conflict against Islamo-fascism obviously circles back to the question of Israel. Fanatical anti-Semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler’s, is now a cultural norm across the Middle East It’s the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Saudis.
—Andrew Sullivan2
New wars are repeatedly justified by analogy with that situation: we must save the Albano-Kosovars, the Kurds (in Iraq, but not in Turkey), Afghan women, etc. During the Kosovo war, I constantly ran up against that argument—but shouldn’t we have declared war on Hitler in 1936?—even from political militants whose supposedly “Marxist” background should have led to more lucidity. The Kosovo example is an illustration of how the use of analogy often enables people to dispense with informing themselves seriously about the realities of a given situation.
We may observe in passing that in the view of classic political liberalism, war strengthens the powers of the state and should be avoided except in cases of extreme necessity. Trade negotiations and cultural exchanges are far preferable to war or to embargoes. The whole ideology of the “new Hitlers” goes against these liberal ideas, and thus is more often adopted by ex-revolutionaries who have renounced their past, retaining only a certain anti-liberal sympathy for violent change. This ideology gives intellectuals a role to play, mobilizing public opinion “before it’s too late.”
There are two answers to this argument, one conceptual, the other historic. The conceptual aspect, that is, the defense of international law in the face of legitimization of preventive war, which constitutes the principal aspect of the response, has already been mentioned. The historic aspect has to do with what really happened before and during the Second World War. It deserves to be recalled, inasmuch as the reference to those events to justify military intervention is symptomatic of a widespread ignorance, or a radical revision, of history. Here we shall be brief, since a treatise on history is beyond the scope of this book.
“Better Hitler than the Popular Front” was a slogan that expressed the attitude not only of the defeatist segment of the French bourgeoisie, frightened by the success of the left in the mid-1930s, but also, each in its own way, of a good part of the British aristocracy, of the American capitalist class and of the dominant social classes throughout Europe. If there was no war against Hitler, it was, among other things, because the “social achievements” of fascism—eliminating left-wing parties and disciplining the workers thanks to corporatism and nationalism—won the admiration of the dominant social classes everywhere, the very counterparts of those who today call for preventive wars against new Hitlers. This being the case, a defensive alliance against Hitler—such as the one that fought in 1914–18, but with the Soviet Union replacing tsarist Russia—capable of preventing World War II altogether by dissuading aggression, was out of the question precisely because of the anticommunism of the ruling circles in the West. Moreover, avoiding war is what would have made it possible to save most of the Jews, since it was only after the war was well under way that they were massively killed. Western government aid to the Spanish Republic, whose victory, had it taken place, might well have served to dampen the ambitions of fascism, was impossible for the same reasons. It should be emphasized that neither a defensive alliance nor aid to a legal government violates international law, in contrast to a preventive attack. Moreover, the Munich Agreement that allowed Hitler to seize the Sudetenland was not merely a matter of cowardice, but was also due to hostility toward Czechoslovakia, the European country most favorable to an alliance with the Soviet Union.
The discourse on the “new Hitlers” is inevitably accompanied by the more or less explicit identification of today’s pacifists with Daladier and Chamberlain. But apart from misrepresentation of the motivations of the “appeasers,” the logical lesson from Munich is not that we should plunge madly into war on all sides to defend minorities, which was precisely what Hitler claimed he was doing. Hitler legitimized his wars as the necessary way to protect minorities, first the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia and then the Germans in Danzig. Note also that at the end of the Second World War, the United Nations was set up precisely to ban “preventive war,” a notion that Eisenhower, for example, viewed as essentially Nazi.
The logical lesson of Munich is that the great power gambit of using the discontents of minorities to destabilize weaker countries is extremely dangerous, at least for world peace, even when the minorities in question welcome such great power intervention, as the Sudeten Germans welcomed Nazi Germany in 1938 and the Kosovo Albanians welcomed NATO in 1999. The fact is that “liberating” the Sudeten Germans encouraged Hitler just as “saving” Kosovo gave American imperialism a huge bonus in legitimacy.
The catastrophe of Hitler’s victory over France in 1940 finally led part of Europe’s ruling circles to fall back on an alliance with the Soviet Union, though too late to avoid the war, too late to avoid the suffering it inflicted on the victims of aggression, and too late to avoid paying the political price that inevitably resulted from the victory over fascism that was primarily due to the Red Army and the sacrifices of the Soviet people. The visionaries who attack “pacifists” by harping on the 1930s would do well to study those years a bit more thoroughly.
Defenders of humanitarian war in Iraq stress the inconsistency of those who oppose such a war in Iraq when they agreed to it in Yugoslavia.3 They are obviously right on this point, and therefore one of the main reasons to oppose the 1999 war was precisely that, by agreeing to it, we were de facto legitimizing an indefinite number of other wars. The endless war in which we are involved today is in part the consequence of the euphoria brought about by the easy victory over Yugoslavia in 1999.
Finally, if playing the little game that consists in saying, once it is known how history turned out, “Ah, if only at such and such a time one had done this or that” (for instance, launch a war against Hitler in 1936), one might as well ask whether it wouldn’t have been a good idea to avoid the First World War. In those days, there was neither Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Milosevic, nor Saddam Hussein. The world was dominated, as it still is today, by governments that are imperialist in their foreign policy but relatively liberal in domestic policy. Nevertheless, this liberalism in no way prevented an accumulation of weaponry on all sides, secret treaties, colonial wars. A spark in Sarajevo and Europe was plunged into a war that dragged the world after it, and whose unexpected results included the emergence of both Bolshevism and fascism. Those who ceaselessly decry the “tragedies of the twentieth century” would do well to reflect on their origins and on the similarity between the interventionist policies and the search for hegemony that they advocate today and the policies that led to the catastrophe of the summer of 1914.
It can be suggested that if World War I is largely forgotten, this is not only because it took place further back in time than World War II. Indeed, the more time passes, the more the Second World War seems to gain importance—in any case, as presented through the dominant interpretation discussed above (sixty years after the end of the First World War, we were in 1978. Who in 1978 was still thinking about the First World War?). The fundamental reason is no doubt that the First World War was the epitome of a totally absurd war. There was no valid reason to wage it in the first place, and the “victory” only gave birth to new problems. The Versailles Treaty, mainly sought by French leaders to protect France by crushing Germany once and for all, is a perfect example of human passions producing the opposite result of the one intended: Germany relentlessly took its revenge, which led to France’s defeat in 1940 and the beginning of the end of its role as a great power. In contrast, thanks to Hitler’s unilateral aggression, the Second World War remains the most justifiable of all wars, at least for the countries he attacked. As a result, constant reference to the Second World War is used to strengthen the case for war, whereas lucid reflection on the First World War would rather be an incitement to pacifism. This partly explains the difference between the way the two are treated.
More generally, there is a pernicious tendency in human psychology to want to “solve” the problems of the past. Sixty years after the fall of Hitler, the “struggle against fascism” and the demand for “vigilance” lest it reassert itself often illustrate this tendency. The deplorable result of this attitude is that horrific atrocities committed by the Americans in Iraq, for example, the destruction of the city of Fallujah, arouse much less attention and protest in France than, for instance, some provocative but inconsequential remark by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
One of the most dangerous illusions afflicting European progressive, ecological, and peace movements is the belief that if only Europe could strengthen its defense and unify, it could serve as a counterweight to the United States. To start with, it is high time to stop using euphemisms such as “defense.” A recent recruitment poster for the Belgian army explained better than any number of speeches what that word means today: it showed soldiers inspecting documents of Afghan civilians. “Territorial defense” is carried out today thousands of miles away from our own territory. If we really want to speak of defense, and not of humanitarian intervention, we need to know against whom we are defending ourselves and what attack scenario is conceivable.
The other problem is that Europe is playing more or less the same role vis-à-vis the Third World that the United States played just after the Second World War. After 1945, the Americans favored the transition from colonialism to neocolonialism, which allowed them to appear as the “good guys” in contrast to the wicked European colonialists, as during the Suez Crisis in 1956. The “anti-American” faction in European ruling circles would no doubt like to regain lost influence by turning the tables again. This naturally leads them to remind everybody that we Europeans, contrary to the Americans, are really civilized and really respect human rights. A good part of the agitation for worldwide abolition of the death penalty (enacted fairly recently in European countries but quickly adopted as a sort of symbol of Europe’s superior moral identity) carries exactly this message. However, the structure of our European societies is too similar to that of the United States and our dependence on the Third World is evolving in ways too similar to theirs for this type of consideration to be anything other than a new “improved” version of “human rights” designed to justify hegemony. Of course, an analogous discourse in the United States serves to assert moral superiority by harping on Germany’s Nazi past and identifying France with the Vichy regime.
Europe faces a dilemma. Either it unifies its foreign policy, achieving what was to a great extent the original project of its founders: to avoid self-destructive internal wars and recover its role of imperial power, and leaving leadership in international and military affairs to the United States. This was roughly the attitude of British ruling circles after the loss of their empire, and of German ruling circles after their defeat. Or else Europe really becomes a superpower, and then it would inevitably come into conflict with the United States. This is doubtless the dream of a faction of European elites, fed up with American arrogance, but is extremely difficult to achieve because of the strong political and media influence of the United States in most European countries, not to mention their interlocking military forces and industries. But suppose this dream came true? What would be the benefits? A new arms race, risks of armed conflict, a new Cold War? What was said earlier about the nature of armies, and the impossibility of using them for humanitarian purposes, applies to all armies, including even a future European army.
On the other hand, France’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated that a European country, acting independently of European Union political structures, could perfectly well, if it had the courage, contribute a symbolic support to all those opposed to American hegemony, and without firing a single shot.
From April 11 to 14, 2002, Venezuela was the scene of one of the most ephemeral coups d’état in history, rapidly brought to an end by a wave of popular support that threw out the putschists and brought Hugo Chávez back to power During that short-lived coup d’état, the Spanish presidency of the European Union rushed to issue a statement of which the conclusion says a lot about the democratic sensibilities of certain Europeans: “Finally, the European Union manifests its confidence in the transition government [meaning the putschists] concerning respect for democratic values and institutions, so that the current crisis may be overcome in the framework of a national concertation and with full respect for fundamental rights and freedoms.”
A few days later, after the putsch collapsed, the European Union adopted a text that welcomed “the restoration of democratic institutions” while expressing its “preoccupation in the face of actions undertaken [by the Chavez government] against national and foreign economic interests.”4
The partisans of intervention sometimes portray themselves as carrying on the noble tradition of left internationalism, but cured of the blindness of Western communists regarding the USSR, China, Cuba, etc. There is nevertheless a vast difference between that traditional internationalism and the current ideology. In the original labor, socialist, communist, or Third World movements, internationalism and solidarity were forms of enlightened self-interest, the idea being that a community of workers or colonized peoples had interests in common and they should unite to defend them. There, at least, the problem of hypocrisy did not arise. Besides, political objectives unified those movements, such as socialism or decolonization. But what, in terms of political objectives, does the left today have in common with the Dalai Lama, the Kosovo Liberation Army, Chechen separatists, Natan Sharansky, and Vaclav Havel? The left cannot have much in common with extreme nationalists, mystics, or staunch supporters of the United States or Israeli colonization. Nevertheless, at one point or another, those individuals and movements have enjoyed strong support from the Western left.
Vaclav Havel, for example, has no problem when it comes to ignoring victims so long as his political friends are responsible for their fate. Shortly after six intellectuals engaged in a nonviolent struggle in El Salvador (as he had done in Czechoslovakia) were assassinated by an army totally dependent on the United States, he declared in an address to the U.S. Congress that the U.S. superpower was the great “defender of freedom,” which predictably won him warm applause.
If Lech Walesa had been doing his organizing work in El Salvador, he would already have entered into the ranks of the disappeared—at the hands of “heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes”; or have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a politician in our country, he would have been assassinated like Hector Oquelí [the social democratic leader assassinated in Guatemala by Salvadoran death squads according to the Guatemalan government]. If Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favor of human rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the independent Salvadoran Human Rights Commission, CDHES]. If Ota-Sik or Vaclav Havel had been carrying out their intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have [been found] one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a university campus with their heads destroyed by the bullets of an elite army battalion.5
Obviously, one can defend the basic rights, such as equality before the law, of political adversaries as well as of friends, but that is no reason to forget the distinction between the two. Besides, one should realize that movements that complain of being persecuted, for example by governments emerging from decolonization, are not always seeking equal rights but sometimes the restoration of former inequalities (a typical example of this phenomenon was the Katangan secession following the independence of the Belgian Congo in 1960). This is the type of distinction that was fundamental for left internationalism, and the disappearance of that distinction is the sign of a grave depoliticization in which good feelings can overrule enlightened self-interest, not out of altruism but simply from lack of lucidity.
The other problem raised by assimilating the present situation to past internationalism is that, for the European left, all references to the interests of the nation have become practically synonymous with fascism. Oddly enough, only minorities have the right to display nationalist sentiments. Stigmatization of “nationalism” is used constantly to condemn any serious criticism of the political direction taken by the European Union; for example, during the 2005 referendum in France on the EU Treaty in which the voters—notably on the left—defied their political leaders and the media to reject a text they judged harmful to their interests. The voters’ reluctance to sacrifice hard-won social and economic rights was condemned as nationalism. But the “nationalism” of a people that wants to protect advantages gained in decades of struggle for progress is not comparable to the nationalism of a great power that takes the form of military intervention at the other end of the earth. Moreover, if it is true that national sovereignty does not necessarily bring democracy, there can be no democracy without it.
Finally, certain radical forms of contemporary internationalism illustrate the dangers posed by misuse of Utopianism. Obviously, a world without borders is desirable, but everyone must know that it will not be achieved in the foreseeable future. And least of all in a world at war. Now, insofar as the present “internationalist” ideology tends to scorn the principle of national sovereignty, it tends to encourage interventions in all directions and underestimates the negative effects that intervention can provoke.
In 2004, two international political petitions were circulated in progressive circles in Europe. One of them exhorted Americans to vote for Kerry against Bush, and the other called on Venezuelans to support Chávez in the referendum on his recall. In both cases, I refused to sign, because both cases illustrated a tendency to assume that national sovereignty has already been more or less abolished, well before such a thing has happened, and before the progressives who make the assumption have really thought it through.
Concerning the petition for Kerry, there were several reasons not to sign it. To start with, in terms of foreign policy, it was by no means so obvious that Kerry was preferable to Bush. His program was at least as militarist as that of Bush, and he had the drawback of being a much more clever speaker. Next, assuming it would be read in the United States, that petition could only be counterproductive. No nation in the world today is more attached to its own sovereignty than the United States, and any attempt to influence its voters is seen as intolerable interference. Moreover, one of the themes of Republican propaganda against Kerry was that he was too “French.” It’s hard to see how reinforcing that notion would do him any good. This example should indicate to those who consider national sovereignty a thing of the past just how much it has not vanished from today’s world but has simply become the privilege of rich countries.
However, the main reason not to sign was that the very attitude of pinning the hopes of the world on Kerry being elected was mistaken. The United States is a sovereign nation and if its voters want to adopt an economic policy leading to their own impoverishment, they have every right to do so. The problem for the rest of the world stems from the United States’ perpetual interference in the domestic affairs of other states. What should be done is to build, through appropriate alliances, a system of international relations that limits that interference, and not pray for the Americans to finally elect a benevolent prince. Many Europeans regret that the rest of the world can’t take part in American elections; but the unworkable nature of that wish illustrates perfectly the error of those who dismiss national sovereignty, as well as the fact that democracy, which they regard with such reverence, presupposes sovereignty as a necessary condition. It is not up to us to vote in the United States, but it is not up to them to decide how the rest of the world should live. To go a bit further, one can suggest that the hoopla in favor of Kerry was essentially for domestic consumption: to rally European partisans of a “moderate” American imperialism and spread the idea that there exists a “good America,” incarnated by the Democrats, who will eventually come back to power one fine day.
The Chavez case was quite different: not voting for him would have been a form of capitulation by the poor majority in Venezuela in the face of internal and external pressures, a bit like what happened in the elections in which the Sandinistas lost power in Nicaragua. My refusal to sign was because I asked myself the following question: Who am I to tell the Venezuelans not to capitulate? Just imagine, as is always possible (think of Chile), that the Americans finally succeed in defeating Chávez by provoking a coup d’état, a civil war, or a conflict with Colombia. It will be the Venezuelans and not I who will have to bear the consequences. What gives me the right to advise them to take such a risk? On the other hand, if they should capitulate in elections, like the Nicaraguans, or through “peace accords,” like the Palestinians at Oslo, one can be sure that the majority of the established Western left will celebrate a new “victory of democracy.” But count me out: real democracy presupposes a lot of things, including genuine sovereignty, which is incompatible with the multiple forms of blackmail exercised on the voters (from Nicaragua to Ukraine), principally by the United States and by international financial bodies.
For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neoconservative allies is that they don’t look on the “War on Terror,” or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the reestablishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear The world is ideologically divided; and—as before—we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with “Islamo-fascism.”
Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, The NewYorker, and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.
But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in “Islamo-fascism,” Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant—and comfortable—with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s “fight” (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles, and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorize, and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.
To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticizing Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq war—among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick, and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment—have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving “preventive war” a bad name.
In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq war—the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted “Off the Island” (i.e., out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war—are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in” (New York Times, 16 August 2006). To be sure, Friedman’s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.
Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he “didn’t realize”(!) how detrimental American actions would be to “the struggle” but insists even so that anyone who won’t stand up to “Global Jihad” just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, writing in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq war of failing “to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously” The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially …
In fairness, America’s bellicose intellectuals are not alone. In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Vaclav Havel has joined the DC-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled Cold War-era organization dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting “the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements”); André Glucksmann in Paris contributes agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8 August) lambasting “universal Jihad,” Iranian “lust for power,” and radical Islam’s strategy of “green subversion.” All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.…
But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure: we are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest
It is thus depressing to read some of the better-known and more avowedly “liberal” intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both wrote portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars—she in Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, a preemptive defense of the Iraq War; he only a few weeks ago in a shameless justification of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (“War Fair,” New Republic, 31 July 2006). In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other difference between them.
—Tony Judt6